The present invention relates to a method for pre-installing software programs, especially to a method for pre-installing software programs that may pre-install different combinatorial software programs by making the image files of operating systems and then making application software programs into file packages.
Computer manufacturers usually have to install the software programs in the hard disks of computers according to the clients"" requirements. There are two well-known methods for the installation.
One is to format the hard disk. First, create the partitions and format every partition thereof. Then install the operating system and further install other software programs. The main disadvantage of the method is time-consuming. Using this method, installing software programs requires formatting the hard disk in advance. It is not an efficient way for computer manufacturers when a large number of new computers need to be pre-installed.
The other method is to create the image file of the hard disk drive. Using the method, all the required software programs are first installed on a source disk drive. Then the data stored in every sector of the source disk are replicated to the corresponding sector on a destination disk drive. In other words, using the source disk drive as the type, the data can be replicated on the destination disk drive, which makes the destination disk identical with the source drive. For example, if the data in sector A on the source drive is xe2x80x9c0011xe2x80x9d, the data in sector A on the destination drive after imaging will be also xe2x80x9c0011xe2x80x9d. By the method, the status of the source drive can be duplicated unchangeably to the destination drive. Moreover, because the source drive has been formatted and the software programs have been installed initially, the destination drive, after duplicating the image files, is also formatted, and the software programs installation is also finished. This method not only reduces the work of disk format but also attains better efficiency.
Although the method of creating the image file is a more efficient way, there are a few drawbacks. Each operating system or application software program corresponds to a fixed image file; hence, when the client wants a different combination of operating systems and application programs, the image file on the source drive need to be changed. If there are two operating systems such as Windows 95 and Windows 98 and three application programs such as Microsoft Office 97, Internet Explorer and Outlook Express, there are 2xc3x977=14 different way to install one operating system and one application program on the computer. Therefore, using the method and technology, it is required to create many different image files because of the variety of client""s requirements.
The objective of the invention is to supply a method for pre-installing software programs, by which one may make the different combinations of configuration according to the different requirements of the clients. Using the method, the user may freely select installing different operating systems and different application software programs.
The other objective of the invention is to supply a method of software installation, by which formatting the partition of the hard disk are no more needed before installing the software programs on a large number of new computers.
Accordingly, first an allocation table document is made in response to the requirement of each destination drive. Then an operating system (OS) image file and an application program (APP) file package is created according to the content of the allocation table document. During the installation, the OS image file which has been made is copied to the destination disk, by which the install of operating system and the formatting of the hard disk are finished. Then the APP file package is copied to the destination disk drive. After all, register each application program separately. On the other words, the invention combines the two known methods for software pre-installing.
Using the image file method, the formatting work of hard disk drive and installations of software programs can be done at the same time. It is an efficient way; however, there is somewhat trade off between the time and the system resource. Because of the possibilities of different combinations of various operating systems and application programs, the image file method uses up excess system resources. In the present invention, the number of image files is reduced because only the OS image file is created. The application programs are stored in the file packages on the destination disk drive as usual. Therefore, different methods are adopted for installing the operating systems and application programs. In addition, the objective to automatically pre-install can be achieved by using a configuration file (Config.ini) to setup the required software programs on each destination disk drive and connecting to the local area network (LAN).